I went to a school with a house system. The houses were given attributes that now seem very familiar from Harry Potter.

We had a brainy Ravenclaw-equivalent, and a rather foolish bumbling Hufflepuff-equivalent (nobody wanted to be in the Hufflepuff-equivalent!) and two other houses. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see that both of the remaining two houses *thought* that they were the Griffindor-equivalent, and considered the other one to be the Slytherin-equivalent.

The similarities were clear enough that when I first read Harry Potter I actually wondered if Rowling at been at my school, but no. So now I suspect these characteristics of being widespread among school houses, at least in the 1980s.

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My secondary school also had a house system. They weren't quite as distinct as the Harry Potter houses were and we had 6 back then (since renamed and reduced to 4), but there were differences in style between them. Monnington, for example, did the annual "Monnington Unplugged" charity concert, while Hodgkin was the house that no-one really noticed, and Smythe had a definite slightly-Slytherin very-bonkers theme. Especially when the 6th Form decided to take over the Smythe wing and require everyone to declare allegiance to Tysonism (we had a very popular history teacher named Tyson, and a 6th Form that was sometimes granted a little too much leeway - looking back on it, I'm amazed that we got away with the "Beware: Tysonism Is Here" presentation - complete with Indepencence-Day flying saucers - that was shown during one event...).

We had 4 houses at my school too, but they weren't really distinguishable except that of course everyone in Horsley, Stowell and Eldon was an idiot compared to people in Collingwood, who were just varying degrees of annoying ;-)

I never noticed that in my school, but I only went in for the 6th form, which had its own house and character (and the Head was our house head). I was only peripherally aware of the lower houses, which blurred in my mind into a vague "Lord of the Flies" mass of noisy, smelly, little monsters. The houses seemed much more determined by their Heads' characters than anything else.